


Orbital

by Tevere



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M, Post-MWPP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-13
Updated: 2007-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-09 18:26:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tevere/pseuds/Tevere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about orbiting is, see, that it's not flying at all -- it's falling. It's just that you're going fast enough to match the curvature of the Earth: you're falling round and round, and never getting any closer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orbital

Remus wraps his arms around himself, resting his chin on his knees. Off to the side and slightly behind, the shadow of the lighthouse is still short, its sharp outline running up and over the dryish spears of grass, busy and antlike on its way to the sea.

"Can you see France from here sometimes, do you think?" Remus asks lazily. The idea of France seems very far away at the moment. It's strange to think that the bright line where sea meets sky might hide red cafe umbrellas, sandy beaches and the French themselves, sunning like so many rows of sardines, bellies flashing whitely as they turn to baste.

Sirius is laid out flat on the grass when Remus turns to look. His hair doesn't look quite black, or brown, or any other normal colour when it's picked up by the wind -- it shimmers as green and blue and purple as a beetle's wing, with tendrils trailing gently away from the main mass like curious fingers. Remus grabs one, wraps it around his finger and gives a gentle tug.

"Sirius."

"I'm awake," says Sirius. "Just ignoring you and your insignificant babble."

"Oh," says Remus, feigning disappointment. "And here I was thinking you were perhaps asleep, and not just being a total prat. My mistake."

"Shh," says Sirius. "You're wrecking the silence."

Remus tilts his head to one side and listens.

There's nothing still about the coast up here around the lighthouse. It's a strange landscape, insubstantial in a way in which nothing seems fixed save the lighthouse itself. It's almost as if it's too full of wide spaces -- wide spaces close-set and interlocked like the panes in a stained-glass window, and someone's set one to vibrating and the vibrations have grown and spread from one pane to the next: from sea to sky to land, and the waves on the bay are humming at the same frequency as the waves in the grasses past the lighthouse.

The lighthouse itself is perfectly still, even though its shadow jumps and hurries with everything around it. Perhaps the lighthouse is the centre of it all, thinks Remus. The epicentre, the eye of the storm, Polaris, and everything's revolving around it: sea and sky and earth moving in a huge, dizzy pinwheel.

Remus cranes his head back and looks up at the top of the lighthouse. Beyond it, the blue goes up and up and up, drawing him with it -- and the only thing anchoring him down is Sirius's hair, wrapped around his finger.

He can hear gulls, and a car coming around the bend from the village.

"It's not really quiet at all," says Remus.

But Sirius is asleep.

Remus breathes out. "Typical," he says to himself, and the pink wildflowers half-hidden in the grass dip in agreement. A field of bright, watchful eyes blinking at him lazily in the sunshine: interested, observing.

"It's complicated," says Remus, breaking off a small flower and rolling it, crushing it delicately, between his fingertips. The smell is sharply pleasant: green and fresh and expansive, and not at all like the thick, secretive smell of greenhouses. It clings a little, even after he wipes his hands idly on his trousers. "Hard to explain."

Remus leans back on his elbows and watches the sea idly. There's a gentle chop close in, teasing up whitecaps that look incongruously like the soft peaks of eggfoam. Further away, though, and the waves wrinkle the surface with tiny, distant detail. Smaller and smaller to the vanishing point: Calais, hidden by the curve of the earth, with waves sweeping up on its foreign beaches in a broad, gentle arc. Normandy, further still, awaiting its next war: soon, now.

Remus realises that Dover's more likely than not visible to the French who're looking in his direction, much as he's looking in theirs. White cliffs on the skyline, rising cleanly and austerely like a bloodless fracture.

It's lonelier here, without Sirius's peacock posturing.

Sirius walks, always, with the assurance that people are watching. He walks with the consciousness of himself as an object of desire: slower than you'd expect, as though the lingering glances are catching him with soft hands, tugging and yearning against the direction of his motion.

He sleeps, though, like nobody's watching. And, usually, nobody is.

Remus watches Sirius sleep for a few moments. His face is tucked into the bend of his elbow, perhaps to avoid the glare, or perhaps just to keep his nose warm. The gesture reminds Remus of Padfoot -- curled with nose under tail on a frosty morning, ears twitching. The twitching is just Padfoot dreaming, says Sirius. Simple doggy dreams of rabbits and suchlike, or of lying besides a warm fire, dreaming.

When Remus points out that it's more than likely impossible to dream of dreaming -- dog or no -- Sirius just shrugs and grins.

Sirius dreams, too. At school their beds were four feet apart, but all Remus ever heard through the curtains was the occasional exhalation with a hint of a groan -- something he knows in hindsight as Sirius's back-arched, soundless orgasm -- or the sounds of biscuits being eaten, or, more rarely, the faint scratching of a quill. Now that Sirius has accidentally fallen asleep in Remus's bed once or twice, though, Remus knows that Sirius dreams with his hands the same way that Padfoot dreams with his ears. Sirius dreams of flying and hexing and taking Mad-Eye Moody's pop tests, and his fingers curl and twitch against the pillowcase.

Sometimes Sirius dreams of fucking, and his cock twitches against Remus's thigh. The times that happens, Remus slides down the bed and takes it into his mouth, just to hear Sirius moan when he wakes.

As far as Remus knows, he's never slept in wolf form. He doesn't particularly want to dwell on what a werewolf might dream of.

Beside him, Sirius shifts from sleeping to waking in a breath.

"I'm awake," says Sirius. "Been awake the whole time, actually."

"Really?" says Remus interestedly. "Are you aware that you have a congenital breathing disorder, then?"

"Bugger off," says Sirius. "I don't snore."

"How would you know?"

"I happen to be particularly in tune with my body. 'S why I'm brilliant at Quidditch."

"Even that time you couldn't stop tapdancing?"

"That was a _hex_," Sirius says indignantly.

Remus takes pity on him. "I'd never sleep with a snorer--"

"We're not exactly _sleeping_ together," says Sirius.

"-- Well. Except for James, and that was because we were in the same dorm, which doesn't really count," says Remus.

"_Would_ you sleep with James?" Sirius asks suddenly.

Remus pauses. The opportunity for a fuckup seems immense. Sirius, haring in from left-field as usual and digging up issues which would've been happier left lying fallow under a leaf fall of last year's dried up emotions. What they have -- this thing between them that's half an unvoiced understanding and half something inescapable, like gravity -- it _works_, quietly and of its own accord. It doesn't need Sirius's push-me pull-me jealousies; doesn't need Remus's moments of sharp, self-directed anger.

The question is still hovering there like a lead-weighted balloon, so Remus says quickly, "Don't be daft." His feigned lightness doesn't quite take, though, hanging between them and forcing another slip-step of awkward silence into which he adds: "Anyway, there's Lily."

"If Lily weren't there."

Disconcerted, Remus falls back onto his elbows and looks up at the lighthouse. The pit of his stomach jumps with an unpleasant sensation that's nevertheless entirely familiar: he's dislocated, pulled bodily into a large, sweeping revolution with the rest of the scenery. It's like flying, like a heady new rush of magic -- and the minute he lets go and stops fighting it, the dizziness is gone.

Something comes back to him from an astronomy class, then. The thing about orbiting is, see, that it's not flying at all -- it's _falling_. It's just that you're going fast enough to match the curvature of the Earth: you're falling round and round, and never getting any closer.

"I don't know," he lies. "Maybe."

There's a hollow on the inside of Sirius's hip laid soft and bare where his t-shirt has ridden up, and Remus follows the curve downwards with the flat of his hand.

"Hmm," says Sirius approvingly, crooked arm still over his eyes, as Remus slides his hand with effort under the tight waistbands of Sirius's jeans and pants. Pubic hair crinkles under his fingertips; he scritches idly, feeling the denim press uncomfortably against the working tendons in his wrist.

Sirius smiles, then, and the shadows under his cheekbones slide lightly off his face and onto the grass next to him. "Go on, then."

Ever-in-motion Sirius Black, who even when lying still has hair and shirt a-flutter as though he's falling -- and Remus, falling towards Sirius as though captured by gravity. Sirius, with his athlete's body, elegant features and small, captive satellite; Sirius lying warm and lazy on the grass with his tight-fitting riding jacket spread wide to expose its silky lining.

Remus straddles Sirius, and the lining is cool and smooth against the backs of his hands as he pushes Sirius's t-shirt all the way up. Glimpses of dark hair under the rucked-up armpits, and nipples like thumbprints. A particularly strong gust of wind sets the world swaying around them: rustling grasses with their little moving shadows, the outline of the lighthouse's shadow wavering and smudged with shifting pastel colours, and Sirius's nipples stand up in points for Remus's tongue.

"Brrr," says Sirius.

Remus noses along Sirius's side and bites the ridge of muscle that curves from shoulderblade to upraised arm. Pale goosebumps prickle all over Sirius's chest like quill dots.

"Hey," Sirius protests, shivering, but his cock leaps rather forthrightly.

Following up on that success, Remus tackles Sirius teeth-first. He bites the lean curve just under the twelfth rib; bites the sharp point of his hip; pinches the soft skin of Sirius's stomach between his teeth while running his hands up and down Sirius's sides, digging his fingers into the underlying muscle and his thumbs bumpitty-bump-bumping over rib corrugations from nipples to waist and back again.

Sirius sighs and keeps shivering. His skin looks tight, drawn up at the nipples and around each upstanding hair. When Remus trails a finger lightly from navel to waistband, goosebumps and tiny prickling filaments tickle the pad. It's a curious sensation, almost like stroking an eyebrow the wrong way, so he does it again. Soft touches now, when before he'd been rough: stroking and sliding and slipping exploratory fingertips into each hollow and curve, and pressing down gently to see the shadows stretch and migrate in response to the altered topology. He takes his time. Makes his touches lazy and teasing rather than gratifying: he's mapping this body, after all. Reclaiming the territory he loses every time Sirius puts his shirt back on afterwards with a laugh and a too-easy smile.

Somewhere north of where Remus's fingers and lips are occupied, Sirius makes a small, aching noise. Remus glances along Sirius's chest -- sternum almost as straight as a plumbline -- and sights Sirius's chin, the triangle of his bent arm, his handsome mouth with lips parted. He traces a hand over Sirius's cock in its faded denim, and is rewarded with another sound: Sirius's familiar voice, but so unfamiliarly naked, so blatantly _wanting_.

And when Remus worries open Sirius's jeans with his teeth, hooking the pants-elastic with his thumbs to keep it down and out of the way, he finds that, like his nipples, Sirius's cock is standing upright for his tongue, too.

"Hm," says Remus mock-thoughtfully, and bats at it with his tongue.

"Oh," says Sirius, exhaling. His cock curves just slightly above his stomach, swaying in the breeze with its own small midday shadow. Like a sundial, Remus thinks, amused. The wet stripe of spit only stays shiny for a second or two, and when he puts his tongue on the same spot again, it feels cold.

The contrast must make his mouth seem warmer than usual, because Sirius -- super-cool Sirius with his arrogant eyebrows and ten different types of mocking half-smile -- groans, bites his lip and arches up with unselfconscious abandon, rubbing the head of his cock between Remus's lips. Remus shapes his mouth around it obligingly, curling his tongue around and over the blunt tip, sucking and then pulling off with a wet _pop_.

"_Christ,"_ Sirius says plaintively. His wet cock bobs pinkly, tenderly, and the tiny gossamer of silver that attaches it to Remus's mouth thins, winks and vanishes.

"Hm," says Remus again. He shapes his tongue into a point and dives for Sirius's navel, tonguefucking it in earnest until Sirius tangles a hand in his hair and pushes him downwards again. After that, it's easy to settle into their usual rhythm: Sirius's hand on the back of Remus's head as he fucks Remus's mouth in short, shallow strokes; Remus using his tongue roughly, dragging it up and down the underside of Sirius's cock until Sirius draws uneven breath and grabs Remus's shoulder with his free hand. He's arched off the grass, naked and pale from pubic hair to collarbones, and when Remus twists his head sideways to see better, he catches Sirius watching intently from above the hectic flush that's creeping up his cheeks.

Sirius keeps the eye contact as he thrusts up slowly. Slow, slow, _slow_ until Remus has pubic curls tickling his nose and an ache in his jaw, and Sirius is gasping and _watching_ and his fingers are tight in Remus's hair and on his arm. The pressure holds them together in a still-life freeze-frame, with Sirius poised and quivering like an egg balanced on a knifepoint.

The stillness spreads outwards around them. Silence, expanding in concentric circles from that singular point where their two bodies overlap -- and instead of being submerged in an aural landscape of wind and waves and rustling grass and mewing gulls, all Remus can hear is Sirius's ragged-edged breaths; all he can hear is a heartbeat crowding its way from where Sirius's cock is pressed warm and heavy against the back of his throat, and he doesn't even have a clue whether it's Sirius's heartbeat or his own that's thudding fast, fast, faster and faster between them.

"Fuck, fuck, _fuuck_," says Sirius hoarsely. His thighs tense, crushing Remus's left wrist into stiff grass bristles and sandy dirt.

_Fuck,_ Remus wants to say, as Sirius shivers against his tongue. Sirius is so tightly-held that it feels like a single flutter could send him over the edge, a tightness that Remus knows must be verging on pain. Balancing, _holding,_ Sirius's sharp grey eyes drawing him in, dizzying him with vertigo. Oh, bright, beautiful boy, fuck, fuck, _fuck--_

Sirius's hips move with quick, desperate thrusts, and the sound rushes back into the world like a wave breaking.

Remus pulls his mouth off Sirius's cock with a rough gasp of his own, and there's a roaring in his ears: Sirius's voice and his own voice and all the noise around them in a wall of hissing and rustling and raspy susurration.

Remus shoves his hand down the front of his trousers and jerks himself off hard and fast to the same rhythm. Unlubricated friction, and it's tight, hot pleasure that sunbursts in his vision with white light white heat.

Sirius opens his eyes as he comes. "Oh, oh-- _oh,_ fuck, _Moony--"_

And that's enough for Remus; sends him shuddering and clenching and bowing over Sirius's body like a mourner.

After, Sirius reaches for him half-roughly and says, "C'mere."

Remus tends to keep his eyes open as they kiss; it's a bad habit, perhaps, this incessant need to _look._ He feels greedy -- like sucking Sirius off or kissing him isn't reward enough in itself, and he has to keep stealing glimpses: little illicit snippets of information stored, squirrel-like, for a solitary wank session or a boring menial task or just one of those times when Sirius is off somewhere else, doing Sirius-y things that don't involve Remus.

He memorises it all: the slight upturn that wrinkles the corners of Sirius's eyes when they kiss closed-mouthed; the pale cracks in his lips from riding the Triumph in cold weather; the precise location of every minor blemish, freckle, scar.

"Thinking again, Moony?" says Sirius. His voice is composed already, lazy. "Can't have that."

"I--" Remus starts, but Sirius is stiffening and fixing on something over Remus's right shoulder. The whites of his eyes are sharply prominent around the grey irises, like an angry dog's.

Remus feels it then: the werewolf's prickling instinct that tells him he's being watched. Where the wolf leaps, though, Remus quails. He almost daren't turn, and it's a child's simple belief: a belief that by looking he'll give his fear shape; that by looking he'll make it _real,_ like a boggart sprung from a dusty box.

There's the shape of grass imprinted into Remus's palm and wrist when he finally raises himself off Sirius. Red-edged, bloodless stars on one side and the cheesecloth stamp of crumpled denim on the other, but it's a distant pain -- now, here, here-and-now, and he's seeing, not fully registering, the dull large shape of a man standing off, just a little way, from where they are.

A man watching them, with red face and white-knuckled fingers on his field-glasses. Under Remus's horrified stare, his florid expression changes quicker than a coin flipped heads from tails. A familiar disgust, twisting his mouth and setting his chin into the neck of his jumper. And somehow disgust is more reassuring than the way it'd been before: slack-mouthed and flushed with the guilty, voyeuristic pleasure of having watched them fuck.

Mortification flash-freezes Remus, fixes him to the spot while the world skews past in a sickening blur. Pillar of salt, pillar of stone--

Lighthouse perched on the white cliff-edge, motionless.

Behind Remus, Sirius snarls low in his throat. Somewhere underneath the sound there's a harsher vibration, something rough and wrong and purely animal that raises Remus's soft human hackles. They're both falling this time, but the difference between them is that Sirius always comes up running, as footsure and confident and arrogant as if he'd never fallen at all.

Nothing really surprises Sirius, but perhaps only because nothing has ever truly gone against his wishes.

Sirius is sitting up slowly, deliberately draping one arm around Remus. He smiles pleasantly, the kind that doesn't move past his teeth. The snarl lingers in the air like a promise of violence.

"Sirius," Remus hisses, his face flaming. He wants to disappear, and he _could_ \-- could reach for his wand and blink out of existence with a word and a thought, but the weight of Sirius's arm is heavy and forestalling.

"Remus," Sirius responds politely, without changing the direction of his gaze. The interloper, like Remus, seems frozen, fixed in Sirius's gaze like a cornered rat. The man is thickened and coarse-looking, meaty lips pulled back from his teeth in an unmoving sneer.

And while they stand frozen there's still the fragile possibility that nothing will happen, that the man will simply take his field-glasses and walk back to the battered little car behind the lighthouse, but Remus's heart sinks as Sirius says in that same ominously pleasant voice: "So you like to watch, do you?"

Sirius is the result of a hundred generations of pure wizard breeding, and there is more pride and magic in his veins than blood. His features are even, handsome, cool with a perfection so distant it almost seems inhuman, untouchable.

And maybe the man would've walked away, maybe he wouldn't have, but now he turns his head and spits, a quick contemptuous gesture that hits Remus like a slap. "Fucking queers."

"You think I'm a queer?" Sirius says conversationally, and his lip twists. Remus feels his scorn like a palpable thing: harsh, unforgiving, remote. "You don't have the faintest idea _what_ I am." And his wrist flicks carelessly once, twice, and the man is gurgling in terror with his hands over his eyes, the hex streaming between his fingers until the wind whisks it away into a milky scatter of dandelion seeds.

"You bloody git!" Remus shouts with real irritation, shaking Sirius's arm off and dashing to the Muggle. The man shrieks as Remus thumbs open his eyelids. The hex has knit its tiny silky feathers across the corneas until the entire surfaces are glazed white and unseeing. They roll in blind horror under his fingers until Remus says quietly, like a blessing, _"Deletrius. Obliviate,"_ and touches his wand to the man's head.

The man crumples into sleep where he stands, the tiny feathers peeling away under the puff of Remus's magic.

When Remus looks up, suddenly tired, Sirius is standing down at the naked cliff-edge by the Triumph. As he watches, Sirius throws a leg over and says impatiently, "Are you coming or what, then?"

"Sirius--" he starts, but the roar of the Triumph's engine is shattering.

The wind out on the edge turns Sirius's hair into a thousand tiny snakes alive with cool energy, and when Sirius looks back his grin turns Remus's protestations to stone. Sirius grins cockily, confidently, with a self-assurance that draws Remus helplessly in.

Sirius has no conception of the idea of Remus _not_ ever wanting him, and his belief shapes the world like a star's immense gravity -- shapes Remus until he has no conception of what it's like to _not_ want Sirius Black. Sirius is an arrogant bastard, a right royal git, but he could have anyone else he wants, and -- for now, at least -- he wants Remus.

Even if Sirius _does_ start wanting someone else, Remus thinks he'll still be able to feel his pull, a tidal force as strong and incontestable as the moon's.

"C'mon, Moony," Sirius yells.

Remus settles behind Sirius, and he's only half-ready when the Triumph growls under them like a live thing and _leaps._ The juncture between land and sea, as precisely defined as a knife cut, flashes past and then the breathtaking expanse of the ocean is rolling outwards, endlessly, beneath them.

The Triumph's magic always takes a moment to kick in, and Remus holds Sirius tightly for the fraction of a second where, instead of flying, they're falling.


End file.
